A Time To Run Read online

  “…said there were dozens of them, maybe hundreds! The Navy and Marines are protecting them.”

  “Who, where?” Ann asked, and Vance shushed her so they could hear. A pause of almost a half a minute followed. He knew he hadn’t lost the transmission; he could hear the carrier wave. It was more likely he was only getting half the conversation. The problem with his radio was the height of the antenna. He’d picked the location near Flag Mountain, west of San Antonio, because it was remote, yet still within driving range of a major city for supplies. He was miles off the main road, and the retreat was in a natural hollow, making it hard to spot, even from the air. But to get a good radio signal, you needed an antenna that was tall. That’s why radio towers were on top of mountains. He’d planned to run an antenna to a nearby ridge and rig a solar powered repeater, but it was an expensive project and had never seemed to make the priority list. His regret level was high just then. Finally, the same person came back.

  “Yes, they’re all surviving. Some scientist there has ways to make fresh food safe. Also I heard one station talking about a cure!” Now everyone in the bunker was holding their breath. “We’re getting ready to head west.”

  “Where, where?!” Harry said under his breath.

  “Who’d think I’d ever actually want to go to Los Angeles?” the anonymous person said. Everyone in the bunker seemed to moan as one and look down at their cooling meal. It was twelve hundred miles to LA, probably more driving. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon. After another pause the voice came back. “Yes, we’re going to meet the Edwards tomorrow night at the rally point, just outside Rock Springs.” Vance keyed the mic.

  “Can you read me?” he said and gave his shortwave call sign. The man’s voice came back a moment later, but he was talking about road conditions and gave no sign he’d heard Vance. Vance tried several more times, then the signal faded a short time later. Everyone sat there while he walked over to the big Texas state map on the bunker wall. He knew where Rock Springs was, almost exactly a hundred miles away. One hundred miles of twisty road, choked with plague zombies and who knew what else.

  They all looked to him for guidance, and that was the absolute last thing he wanted to see. He opened his mouth to speak, but there was a crash against the bunker door leading up to the house. Everyone jumped, and one of the girls gave a little scream. All three dogs were instantly on their feet, hackles raised, growling low. Another crash, and another. Vance raced over to the monitors, the ones hooked to cameras just above their heads. It only took one look to confirm the worst. The infected were in the house.

  * * *

  International Space Station

  Alison was woken up by her hand drifting into her face. She opened her eyes and looked around. The notch in the wall of the space station, a crew compartment they called it, was about twice as much space as she needed. She was tucked into a sort of mummy bag—she’d fallen asleep halfway through their discussion of the abilities of the Azanti and someone had tucked her into bed.

  She yawned and looked around, orienting herself the best she could. The sleeping space was about the size of a phone booth, lined with white padding, and had a pair of laptop computers mounted on a sort of bench. It was bereft of any decoration, having been empty until she was loaned the space to get some rest. She was tempted to go back to sleep, but her bladder had other ideas.

  They’d docked at PMA-3, the pressurized mating adaptor, then spent an hour talking about their ship before Alison fell asleep. She unhooked herself from the sleeping bag and folded back the compartment door. Outside was Node 2, mainly lab space and the sleeping compartments. No one was outside the door. She pulled herself out, glad for the days of practice in zero gravity aboard Azanti, and looked at the labels. There was only one toilet on the US part of the station, and she had no idea where it was.

  She looked around for a moment, reading all the various signs. None of them said ‘toilet,’ of course. The hatches leaving the Node all went into sub-modules, except one that looked like a tunnel. The sign said “Destiny.” Ironic, she thought as she grabbed one of the blue maneuvering handles that were almost everywhere, and gently launched herself.

  The Destiny turned out to be all laboratory and computers, so she checked her velocity and continued onward. Next in line was Node 1. She stopped herself there. Lots of exits. However, from one came a slight hint of an unmistakable smell. Node 3 it was labeled, and when she pulled herself inside she found a cabinet with a cute little cartoon astronaut floating outside the ISS, holding a roll of toilet paper next to an orbiting outhouse.

  “Bingo,” she said, and none too soon! Inside she took a few anxious minutes figuring out the mechanisms. She realized halfway through the operation that she lacked a personal ‘urine cup’ to hook to the collection device. “Bet I’m gonna catch it for this,” she mumbled as she sighed with relief. The suction was prodigious, and nothing went flying. It was a million times better than the experience aboard the Azanti. At least the men could stick their organs in a bottle. Her internal plumbing simply wasn’t designed for that sort of docking operation. They were completely out of paper towels on the tiny ship.

  Relaxing to ‘let it fly,’ poised over the contraption with a suction hose pushed against her was the strangest experience in her life, next to traveling faster-than-light, of course. She’d had to learn to use a personal urination device years ago; peeing standing up was bad enough. Trying to do it floating over what amounted to a sucking coffee pot was ten times worse.

  Greatly relieved, Alison slid the doors open with a sigh. Now that she’d relieved herself, she wondered where everyone else was, and if there was food. They hadn’t eaten more than protein bars and juice boxes for days.

  The station was a lot louder than she’d expected. It must have been a combination of air circulation fans and a myriad of other machinery that created the loud background noise. Not quite like white noise, though still omnipresent. She went back to the entrance to Node 1 and listened. Oriented below her was the hatch standing open to Azanti. To her left was back toward Node 2 where she woke up. To the right was a strange angled tunnel and a sign that said “To FGB.” She thought she heard thumps and people moving down that way.

  Alison pushed herself in that direction. As she reached the hatch, she grabbed what she thought was a handhold. It clicked, and the wall started to move! Only it wasn’t the wall, it was the hatch.

  “Oh, great,” she said, and spun around to put her feet against the floor. Or wall, ceiling? Whatever, she pushed/pulled the hatch back to where it was, only it didn’t lock back in place. “Crap,” she mumbled and messed with it for a bit before giving up. It slid about half closed and stopped. She slipped through the remaining space and through the angled tunnel.

  On the other side was a sort of connector tunnel. It looked a lot different than the other nodes. It was older, the paint more worn, and the wiring had an improvised look to it. All the hatches were closed, the one straight ahead only about half way. She grabbed a handhold, reached for the edge of the hatch, and instantly pulled her hand back when it touched something wet and sticky. She looked and saw her fingers were covered in something red. Red and gooey. Suddenly she realized she smelled a strong coppery odor.

  “Blood?” she said incredulously. She rubbed her fingers together. It sure as hell felt like blood! Without really thinking about it, she wiped her hand on her coverall, took a grip on the door at a different location, and slid it like the other one. It moved out of the way and revealed the inside of a module. Slowly spinning in the center amidst a swirling constellation of blood globs was the copilot, Lloyd Benson. It was immediately apparent as he spun that most of his throat was torn out. His eyes were open wide in the terror of confused death.

  Alison sucked in her breath and began to scream. A hand clamped over her mouth from behind. She screamed around the hand as she felt another go around her middle, just under her breasts. She tried to bite the hand and it was jerked away h
astily. She threw an elbow back as hard as she could and got a grunt of surprise. She pushed away and right into the whirling mess of blood.

  “Damn it, Alison,” Alex growled, holding his ribs with one hand and grabbing her leg before she could smack into their dead friend with the other. He had a foot expertly stuck through a support.

  “What the fuck—” she started to scream. He put a finger over his lips and made a loud shushing hiss.

  “Quiet, damn it!” he said and spun around to look back down the twisted tunnel. “How did you get here without them getting you?”

  “Who getting me?” she asked, shuddering but controlling herself to some degree. “What the fuck happened to Lloyd? Christ, it’s like he was attacked by an animal!”

  “You could say that,” he said and slid the door closed again. “Watch the door while I search.”

  “Search for what? What do you mean? What’s happening?”

  “The virus,” he said. Her mind whirled for an indefinite time, then locked onto the narrative.

  “Delta on Earth? How? They haven’t been down in months, and we didn’t bring any fresh food!”

  “I don’t know,” Alex admitted. He moved past his dead friend like he was nothing more than a Halloween decoration in particularly bad taste. He began systematically opening compartments and throwing their contents around helter-skelter. “When we tucked you into bed, we came down here to listen to the broadcasts from Earth. They asked if we were hungry. They’d just eaten before we docked, and said they were sorry they’d finished. They offered us some freeze-dried food.”

  He pulled an instrument out and weighed it, swinging it back and forth. Apparently deciding it didn’t meet with his approval, he let it go and it floated away, bouncing again Lloyd’s body. Alison looked away from the scene. It wasn’t at all like the movies.

  “Well, we ate some of their food, and while we did, I noticed that Commander Richardson was beginning to act strange. She was distracted and kept losing her train of thought. I was so busy trying to understand what was wrong with her, I didn’t realize it was happening to Thorson as well. Richardson suddenly jerked like she was having a seizure. Lloyd is, was, a trained paramedic. He didn’t think, he just floated over and grabbed her. Before anyone could do anything, she ripped his throat out.”

  “Oh my God,” Alison said, putting a bloody hand to her mouth. She realized what was on the hand and her eyes got even wider. She felt bile rise in her throat and had to fight hard to keep it down. Not easy, in zero gravity. Alex glanced back at Alison and yelled at her.

  “Watch the damned hatch!”

  “Sorry!” she said and looked back through the little glass window in the hatch. Because of the angle of the tunnel, she couldn’t see anything beyond it. “What happened next?”

  “Well, Lloyd was gushing like a horror film, trying to scream and only gurgling. Thorson was jerking like a late stage Parkinson patient, and Richardson was…chewing.”

  “Damn it,” Alison moaned, almost puking again.

  “You fuckin’ asked,” he said.

  “I just don’t know how you can be so cool.”

  “I watched my wizzo bleed out at thirty-thousand feet one time, trying to get back to the carrier,” he said, his voice without emotion. “I didn’t know Lloyd nearly as well.” He was quiet for a moment as he rummaged, then went back to his monologue. “I thought about fighting for a second, then realized Thorson was coming out of it and looking at me like an extra-rare T-bone dinner, so I took off.”

  “Where? It’s not like there’s a lot of places to go in this thing.”

  “I slid down the docking collar out into Node 1, swung into Node 3 and hid in the toilet.” Alison shook her head, thinking she’d just been there. “I peeked out through and saw them both fly by a few seconds later. They must have just missed me. They also weren’t very coordinated in zero gravity.”

  “They’ve both been up here more than a month,” Alison pointed out.

  “Yeah, but the virus must have done more than made them insane cannibals.”

  “I was down in the sleeping compartments. Shit, they must have gone right by me too!” She thought about what would have happened if she’d gone the other way.

  “Must have,” he agreed, “they were down there. Gotcha!” Alison looked back in time to see Alex hastily stuff a vodka bottle into the top of his light jacket and zip it up. She was about to ask why the hell a bottle of booze was so important when he pushed next to her, grabbed the blood smeared hatch by its handle, and asked “Ready?” before bracing and pulling it up and out of the way.

  “I still don’t understand why they went crazy just after we showed up?”

  “I fear we somehow brought the virus with us. Remember, we left while it was ramping up.” He stopped at the end of the tunnel, whispering back toward her. “Maybe it’s in the air we brought with us?”

  “Then we’d have it too,” she whispered back. He was at the hatch into Node 1 and held up a hand back to her. They both fell silent. The hatch was still half closed, just like she’d left it. Clearly this bothered him, though, so she told him she’d accidentally released the hatch, sotto voce. He grunted in acknowledgement.

  “We need to get at least one oxygen bottle before we get out of here,” he told her.

  “We’re leaving?”

  “We have to. This station is infected, at the least. And there are two crazy cannibal astronauts trying to kill us and eat our faces off. Do you want to stay?” She shook her head emphatically. “I didn’t think so. They have several in Node 3, with the toilet. Know where that is?” She nodded and pointed.

  “Right over there.” He nodded also.

  “Good. Stay here, I’m going to scoot in there nice and quiet, grab a bottle,” he pointed at the entrance to the lock where their ship was docked, “and get the hell out of here.”

  “That last part sounds like a great idea,” she said. Alex braced himself and slowly slid the hatch open. It sounded to Alison like someone dragging a concrete block across a metal plate; it had to be reverberating throughout the entire station! After a second it was open enough that he slid through.

  “It will take me a minute to get the tank. Keep an eye out? They have to be down at Node 2 at the other end of the station.”

  “What do I do if I see them?” Alex looked back and shrugged.

  “You’ll think of something.” He said and, just like that, he floated away and into the node with the bathroom, leaving her alone.

  She tried to make herself invisible in the twisted tunnel, and largely failed. The space angled and narrowed like a funnel. In her blue OOE jumpsuit against the white of all the containers fixed to the wall of the passage, she was as visible as a hunk of coal in a snow field. As the minutes dragged on, she thought she heard a few noises from the direction Alex had gone. The omnipresent background noise made it difficult to be sure. She could swear he’d said something, so she floated out and next to the entrance to Node 3 where the bathroom and her friend was. She saw his legs sticking out of an open access panel and grunting sounds.

  Alison sent thoughts of ‘hurry’ as she floated away, and she moved back over to the tunnel down to where the Azanti was located. The hatch stayed open, but all the waste containers had thankfully been removed by the ISS crew before everything had gone south. She could see one of the control panels, lights on standby glowing cheerily. Something went clang and she jerked, sending herself into an unfortunate spin in the center of the module.

  For a few horrified seconds, she was unable to reach anything and spun on several axes like a child’s toy. She moaned and kept trying to see in the direction of the sound, her mind going crazy with images of blood-splattered astronauts coming to rip her throat out! It took all her will to calm down and wait until she drifted closer to one wall and flailed into a handhold. She grabbed it like a drowning swimmer offered a life preserver.

  When she’d regained control, she could see what had caused the noise. It was the hu
lking figure of Dean Thorson. He was halfway down the connector to Node 2, and he was badly entangled in a series of cables that ran between the nodes. His eyes were wide, and he was struggling with bared teeth. Every few seconds he would snarl and reach toward Alison. She jerked when he did. The look on his face was…horrifying.

  Alison almost bolted for the Azanti right then and there. The inhuman look on the former astronaut’s face made her feel like she wanted to throw up again.

  “Alex,” she tried to call, then stopped, realizing the commander was still out there too, somewhere, listening, hungry. But where Thorson was trapped, there was an opportunity. He was in the middle of the connection between the nodes. If she could get close enough, she could maybe close the door on him!

  It went against her every instinct to go toward the insane man instead of as far away as she could get. Still, that’s exactly what she did. She pushed off the handhold and toward the hatchway. For a terror-filled moment she thought she’d misjudged and was going to fly right into Thorson’s arms, but there was a blue handhold and she caught it, swinging to a stop with more grace than she’d intended. Thorson snarled and swiped at her, pulling the cable even tighter around his waist.

  Alison shifted her grip and reached up, grabbing the handle of the hatchway between herself and Thorson. She pulled the release and it came loose, sliding downward. She put a hand against the wall and pushed it closed. Thorson gave one last snarl as it thumped closed, clicking as it locked. Alison gave a little laugh of celebration as she pulled herself to the tiny window to look at the man. A second later Thorson slipped the cable around his waist and slammed up against the hatch.

  “Jesus,” she hissed and pulled back. Thorson slammed his face against the glass, teeth snapping as if he could bite through and reach her. Blood ran from split lips, and he broke a tooth. There were red blobs of blood floating in the zero gravity as Thorson flailed and bit at the lock. “F-fuck you,” she stammered and pushed back. She floated back away from the hatch, slowly passing over the one that led down to their ship. She’d just turned her head to look toward Alex, when something slammed into her.